One of the tasks of medical practitioners is to make a diagnosis based on medical data. The medical data holds information pertaining to a condition of a patient. The medical data is available as medical images or in written form, such as laboratory reports. The medical images and the other medical data, collectively called studies, are acquired from medical imaging techniques such as computer tomography (CT), PET or X-ray. The medical practitioner uses a large number of studies which he or she inspects visually in order to establish a diagnosis or to monitor the patient's condition during a course of treatment. One of the approaches taken is to inspect successively a sequence of studies in a chronological order. This approach allows the medical practitioner to ascertain trends and developments in the patient's condition. For example, CT slices of a body part inflicted with a tumour are acquired over a period of time and are visually compared using post-processing software, e.g. “viewers”. The medical practitioner visually compares a series of CT slices obtained by searching and selecting one CT slice per week from all of the acquired CT slices acquired. The slice, a “prior”, is representative for that week. A number of representative CT slices from various weeks are for example compared with each other or with another CT slice taken before treatment commenced, termed the “baseline” image. In this way, the growth or degradation of the tumour can be monitored over time.
Currently, the medical practitioner, upon querying a number of databases, draws up a list of images that he wishes to inspect, retrieves the images and loads the images manually into a viewer. This approach is rather cumbersome and prone to many errors when inspecting the studies.
The medical practitioner must often for the purposes of differential diagnosis consider and “cross-inspect” images of different kinds and in different formats. This includes studies acquired using different equipment. A variety of different viewers is normally needed.
When drawing up the list of images, the medical practitioner must make a choice as to a time resolution at which he wishes to view the series of images. In the example of the tumour discussed above in which one image for each week is selected, a time resolution has been chosen to be a weekly one. However, in the course of a differential diagnosis, for example, it may be necessary to view the series of images at a finer time resolution, for example specified by daily intervals rather then weekly intervals. Therefore, the medical practitioner will have to repeat the procedure outlined above. In this repeat study the medical practitioner will select one study for each consecutive day from the list of images.
Once the medical practitioner has finally compiled the list of the images of interest after searching, selecting and sorting them, he or she will have to load each ones of the images into the viewer. The medical practitioner will need to be aware of a rank (baseline, current, prior 1, prior2, etc) of the study currently being viewed. His or her attention is thus distracted as he or she will frequently have to keep an eye on the list of images of interest in order to determine the rank. This method can become unwieldy if he or she has to toggle between several ones of the studies of interest.
It will be useful to provide a user interface, which allows the medical practitioner to carry out in an intuitive and interactive manner visual examination of a large number of sequential data. More specifically, there is a need for a user interface permitting multiple ways of viewing a large number of items of sequential data of different formats for the purposes of comparison of the items of sequential data. Furthermore there is a need to be able to efficiently adapt a time resolution at which the medical practitioner wishes to conduct a visual inspection of the studies
A current system for managing medical data is, for example, disclosed in the applicant's US patent application 2006/0031017. This application relates to interpolation and merely teaches how to generate intermediate images for a sequence of images. Teachings as to alleviate the burden on the user in interfacing with sequential data are not disclosed.
US patent application WO 2004/034910 discloses a display processor for representing data in a composite display.
It will be appreciated that the invention may be put into good use wherever there is a need to manage and examine large amounts of items of data in different formats. The data represents a snapshot of the state of a system at a time. By using the invention for examining such items of data, the behaviour of a complex system can be analyzed to detect trends. One example in addition to the medical examples discussed above is for the purposes of fault diagnosis.